Auction Items in Raiser's Edge, Sharing in GoogleSheet

Barbara Krause

Hello,

I'm curious how other non-profits handle organization of auctions items received for a large gala event. 

Our Development Office assumed responsibility for receiving all auction items approx. 10 years ago to track the donors, donations and acknowledgments within RE.  We have approx. 200+ items combined into 100 live and silent auction packages.  Basically to keep it as organized as possible utilizing RE and especially for future events so we only solicit local businesses once per calendar year.

Historically, as auction items are received throughout the week, they are entered into an RE batch and each Friday, a query is run, exported to excel, and a revised listing of all "auction items received" is emailed to Auxiliary/Board members.  A few weeks from the event, the items are combined to make substantial packages and organized into auction bidding categories (Sports, Home, Kids, etc.) 

For the upcoming event in March, 2016, the new planning committee would like to utilize a GoogleSheet as an active document they can access daily for items received, follow up done, categorization, etc.  They will use this data to assemble the final packages and send to the online cellular bidding company. 

I'm ready for a change and to empower the auction committee to actively engage in the process of follow up, assembling/packaging, numbering, etc. but it makes me nervous.  How do I incorporate RE into Google without having to enter each auction item twice; one into RE and again into Google?

Has anyone else utilized RE and GoogleSheet for auction tracking?  What has worked well for you for larger auctions's that keeps all information organized and efficient?  I'm looking for some fantastic organizational ideas and concepts to coordinate this fantastic group of volunteers.

Any advice is much appreciated.

Regards,

Barb

P.S We do not have Blackbaud's auction pro maestro but we do have the events module.

John Heizer

For the auction at our big annual event the Events Manager and her team do all the data entry directly into the online/mobile bidding auction software (which can change from year to year).  When the event is over I take that data (often "massaging" it in Access) and then import it into RE.  It gives the Events folks the functionality they want but also lets us have a consistent set of data in RE to compare year to year giving.  During the solicitation period the interim" reports are run from the auction software, final reports get run from RE ("If it's not in RE it didn't happen").

Jennifer McHale

Barbara,

We also use a Google Spreadsheet to share information with our gala committee. I think there are a couple of questions here, so I'm going to do my best to answer them:

1) Uploading data: if you are already exporting the data to an Excel sheet, there is really no difference. You just might need to take one extra step to copy and paste into your Google spreadsheet (unless, of course, there is dramatically different formatting. But, in that case, you were probably doing extra work in Excel already!)

2) Empowering volunteers: all of gala volunteers have access to the spreadsheet (and other materials) that we upload to that folder. We strongly encourage them to initial anything they change (and leave a comments column specifically so that they can provide notes / updates). Honestly? Most of them just work through me. I'm doing most of the updating! But we use color to indicate complete / confirmed ... strike throughs to show "not this years" ... and lots of notes.

Let me know if you have any other questions!

Jennifer